Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, are asymmetrical molecules and can be either "right-handed" or "left-handed". If left to itself, a pool of amino acids will naturally assume the most disorderly (highest entropy) state, which is half right-handed and half left-handed. This process is called racemization. All living organisms, however, artificially maintain themselves in a state of pure left-handed amino acids. When an organism dies, therefore, its amino acids slowly begin to change (racemize) from their pure left-handed state back to their natural state of half right-handed and half left-handed. Some scientists have proposed that, by measuring the rate of racemization, and the relative percentages of right-handed and left-handed amino acids, the death of the organism can be dated. Most scientists, however, reject Amino Acid Racemization Dating (AAR) as unreliable because the rate of racemization can be highly dependent on temperature and pressure, and can also be subject to contamination. Indeed, AAR has yielded some highly anamolous dates, such as assigning an age of tens of thousands of years to a fossil found in sediment hundreds of millions of years old, and some young-Earth advocates have seized upon these inconsistencies to cast aspersions on dating methods in general. Such claims, however, place a great deal more faith in the AAR method than is warranted. AAR differs from most other dating methods on one very important point: The process of racemization, which is a chemical process, does not proceed at a constant rate, but is highly affected by changes in temperature and pressure. Radioactive decay, on the other hand, is a nuclear process that proceeds with such extreme constancy that no relevent process is known to man to alter it. In fact, one of the main proponents of AAR (a group at the U of Massachusetts that performs the technique, http://www.geo.umass.edu/amino/aalintro.html) cautions that it is important to precisely ascertain the thermal environment of the sample over its entire lifetime before attempting AAR. Even Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research wrote about the extreme uncertainty of the rate of racemization (ICR Impact #23, http://www.icr.org/pubs/imp/imp-023.htm). Although some young-Earth advocates claim that the anamolously young dates given by AAR falsify the scientific old-Earth position. However, the truth is that Gish was right in the first place. Amino Acid Racemization Dating is a highly unreliable method that should not be used to support either a young-Earth or old-Earth position.